The Magic Key R6 Gold 2008 Edition is made by the NeoFlash Team. The NeoFlash team is known for having very bad quality carts, unfortunately. However, in the past year they have started shaping up their image by upgrading their current carts instead of moving on an creating completely new ones. They have a strong past in the homebrew scene by hosting a homebrew coding competition every spring and summer. The winners receive monetary gifts as well as free products made by NeoFlash. NeoFlash is also known to be rather expensive by charging $70 for a product another manufacturer would make and sell for $40. You are in for a surprise, the R6 Gold isn't half bad.

Receiving the Cart

I was able to receive the cart as a prize when I won 10th place in the NDS Application Division of the NeoFlash Spring Coding Competition 2008, so I did not have to pay the outrageous prize of $70. It shipped through EMS China Post and took about 2 weeks before it got to my house in Minnesota, which is a faster shipping time than other times I have bought things from China. The cart came in a cardboard box slightly beat up from the journey over to the US. The R6 Gold box was packed in the cardboard box with Chinese newspaper, an added bonus.

First Glance

When I took the R6 Gold's box out of the cardboard box it shipped in, I was impressed by the quality of the box. NeoFlash has definitely out grown the "Action Figure" packing of the older Neo carts such as the Neo 2 and 3. The only thing wrong with the box is when the advertise the motion functions and spell everything wrong, namely the "axis" spelled as "asix". You'd think with the money people pay for these carts, that they would be able to afford a translator. The cart design has much improved since the past flashcarts by NeoFlash. It also has some pretty awesome shiny art to it.

Reality

When you first boot up the DS with the R6 inserted, you are greeted with a white screen. Many of you probably will, such as I did, wonder why you don't see a menu yet. After about 10 seconds or so the card finally starts. The reason it takes so long is that the card is mind numbingly slow. Make sure you have a good chunk of time set aside when using this cart.

The Menu:

When Using as a Flashcart:

The menu for the flashcart, as I said, takes a little while to boot up. When it finally does you will be greeted by the Neo Team 2008 Logo (It looks slightly like the Beijing 2008 Olympics logo). A filebrowser will also load on the bottom screen displaying the folders and files on the root of your card along with their icons. Since the card has a motion card built in into, they decided to take advantage of this feature by putting a little image on the top screen that moves around in the direction you move the DS. It's more fun than actual playing a DS game I believe. You can turn the DS sideways to have the screen flip, much like on the iPhone/iPod Touch. You can adjust the reading speed of the microSD by pushing select, adjust save type for games not in the database by pressing L. There are a lot of loading related problems associated with the menu, such as slow ROM and homebrew loading.

When Using as a PassMe3(NoPass):

When the microSD card is not inserted in the R6, you may use it as a PassMe for Slot-2 carts. When booting up the DS you will be greeted with a choice of options. Press Y to set the savetype to 4K, Press X for 512K, Press A for 2/4/8M, and B to set it as a motion card. You may then press Down or Up to boot to Slot-2 or the Slot-1 microSD port, respectively. The savetype selector is for when running ROMs of a Slot-2 cart, and you want/need to save onto a real DS Cart.

Compatibility:

ROMs/Commercial Games/Backups:

Compared to past NeoFlash carts, this baby is God when it comes to compatibility. I tested several ROMs (I dumped them myself legally) from a few years back and those worked fine. It was the newer ones that I had problems with and had to select the savetype manually. Smaller ROMs tend to work much better, as the cart is generally pretty slow. I would recommend buying a very fast microSD to make up for the cart's slow speed.

Homebrew:

The homebrew support was pretty good from what I experienced. MoonSHell was a bit slow and had trouble viewing media because of the slow cart, but other homebrew had no problems. IT supports auto-DLDI patching, which is always nice. It does not have the ARM7 related issues that the R4 and M3 Simply and clones have.

Motion:

The motion card is probably my favorite part of it all, and is pretty much the reason for picking the R6 Gold as my prize. Unfortunately only about 50% of the motion homebrew I tried worked because the other 50% were built with an older version of the NDS Motion development library that did not include support for the R6. As new homebrew comes out, however, it should get better.

Rumble:

The rumble is pretty much an exact copy of the official rumble pak, but crappier. It is pretty much a noise maker and you can't really feel the vibrations. It does, however, work with official rumble games. It also has shells for Lite and Phat DSs so that it fits. As usual with NeoFlash and their Slot-2 carts, the pins stick out for no apparent reason.

- The card is slow as molasses.
- The savetype is not always detected if the game is not in the database.
- Motion doesn't always work.
- Rumble just makes noise.
- Menu is really ugly.
- Has issues with SDHC over 8GB right now.
- microSD slot feels flimsy.

Review Score:

7/10

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